Día de San Juan Chamula

The community of San Juan Chamula is a very religious community, with a blend of catholicism and their traditional beliefs, that is fighting tooth and nail to hold on to its identity and traditions. It is from this community that the residents of Damasco were either expulsed for religious intolerance or moved away to find cheaper land to till. One of the main ways in which Chamula preserves its traditions and identities is through its religious celebrations, which coincide with important harvest dates in the Mayan calander, and Andrea and I got the chance to experience one of these festivals last sunday, the fiesta of San Juan.

We learned about this festival while reading the book titled ¨Juan Pérez Jolote¨ (¨Juan the Chamula¨ en inglés). The book is a biography (who knows if its true) that follows the life of a man growing up in the municipality of San Juan Chamula in the early 20th century. In a part of the book, Juan becomes the ´fiscal´ for the community, who is the person in charge of announcing the correct days of the fiestas, because he is able to read. The previous fiscal had gotten the day wrong for the fiesta of San Juan (June 24), and instead they celebrated it on the 23rd. As a result of this, they threw him in jail! This caught our attention and we decided it would be a shame to miss it while we were in Chiapas.

The fiesta of San Juan occurs on June 24 every year and is celebrating San Juan Bautista (John the Baptist), who is the patron saint of San Juan Chamula. The community of San Juan Chamula is located about 20 minutes northwest of San Cristóbal, and consists of 3 different barrios (San Juan, San Pedro, and San Sebastian). It is mostly farmland in which people grow corn and beans and raise sheep, however it is becoming grossly overpopulated. As people have 8, 10 , or 12 kids, they will divide up their property equally among them so that now, there is hardly enough land to grow subsistance farming...let alone make any sortof income, which is a necessity as the western world slowly encroaches on their life. As a result, many will move away, or go to work on large coffee plantations on the coast (or as I´ve mentioned earlier, los Estados Unidos). The leaders of Chamula have taken very strict measures to preserve its identity as well as maintain control. Mestizos are not allowed to own any land in the municipality of Chamula, nor are they allowed to spend the night there unless they get consent from leaders. Chamula has their own police force and laws, which are completely independent from Mexican laws. The leaders also have control over the sell of pox (pronounced ´posh´), a cane based liquor considered to cleanse the soul, as well as Coke and Pepsi, which have taken on a sortof mystical cleansing aspect as well. As I have mentioned earlier, Chamula leaders do not allow any political parties other than the PRI nor any religions other than Catholicism. This is in part to preserve the power that they currently have through the church, but also to prevent the destruction of their traditions, as has occurred in many indigenous communities throughout the country.

When Andrea and I arrived at the fiesta, there were thousands and thousands of people there. Most of them were wearing their traditional dress: for women, it is the same colorful silk fabric they wear all the time as well as a black woolen dress, and for men, a woolen chamarro that fits over the shoulders and goes down to the knees, tied on with a belt as well as a straw sombrero. The church bell was constantly ringing and fireworks were continuosly going off in the plaza in front of the church. We squeezed our way to go take a look at where the fireworks were going off, getting plenty of strange looks coming our way (but it wasn´t like we were the only gringo tourists in attendance). There was a band of musicians wearing red chamarros and wearing hats that I have heard were made out of monkey skin. The large doors to the church were wide open, which are only opened during festival days, and it is usually very dark within the church. There was a parade going around the plaza with a few manikin dolls and and some flags (we would soon find out the importance of these figures). I had been told not to take any pictures within the church, but that it was okay to take pictures outside the church. So, working on this assumpion, it is only natural to take a picture of a parade that is walking right in front of you. After I took the picture, a man next to me told me that I wasn´t allowed to take that picture, so I said I was sorry and put my camera away in my backpack. Then the guy signals to someone standing on a podium, who starts pointing at me...and soon I find myself surrounded by 5 large men in the white chamarros who were in possession of fairly large sticks. These were the Chamula police I assume, and the main one was explaining that I had to delete the pictures I just took, while the other ones were whispering disparaging remarks about gringos under their breath. The main one was explaining that the flags and the manikins were religious images (probably of San Juan) and that it is prohibited to take any pictures of them. So he went through my camera and we deleted every picture that had the images in it. He was actually surprisingly nice about it...it could have turned out much much worse. I´ve heard stories of many a tourist that have wound up in a Chamula jail for taking pictures inside the church. Chamula is very serious and protective about their religion, which is probably one of the most iconographic and symbolic religions that I have witnessed. He said that pictures outside the church and of the mercado were fine, but that the images were off limits. Needless to say, I left my camera in my backpack for the rest of the day. We left before it got too late in the afternoon, because we heard that the drinking gets heavier and more violent the later in the day it gets.

It´s impressive that the community of San Juan Chamula has been able to preserve their culture and traditions through all these years while other communities have lost them or are beginning to lose them. The downside is that they have preserved these traditions through violence and intolerance, such as the burning of protestant temples and the murdering of other indegenous people who have converted to protestantism. Although the protestant and muslim missionaries do nothing but divide the indigenous communities, Chamula responds with religous intolerance that seems unjustified. I´m glad that we got to experience a religious festival of San Juan Chamula, it provides us with a greater understanding of where the people of Damasco came from and why they left. I would definitely like to visit Chamula again after reading more about it.

To read more about Chamula, here are a few articles about the religous beliefs, political structure, and expulsions:

Chickens in Church
Cola Wars in Mexico
Evangelicals and Catholics in Chiapas